Neil Hamilton (St. Thomas, MN) has a new article on SSRN, Professional-Identity/Professional-Formation/Professionalism Learning Outcomes: What Can We Learn About Assessment From Medical Education? 

Here’s an except from the abstract:

The accreditation changes requiring competency-based education are an exceptional opportunity for each law school to differentiate its education so that its students better meet the needs of clients, legal employers, and the legal system. While ultimately competency-based education will lead to a change in the model of how law faculty and staff, students, and legal employers understand legal education, this process of change is going to take a number of years. However, the law schools that most effectively lead this change are going to experience substantial differentiating gains in terms of both meaningful employment for graduates and legal employer and client appreciation for graduates’ competencies in meeting employer/client needs. This will be particularly true for those law schools that emphasize the foundational principle of competency-based learning that each student must grow toward later stages of self-directed learning – taking full responsibility as the active agent for the student’s experiences and assessment activities to achieve the faculty’s learning outcomes and the student’s ultimate goal of bar passage and meaningful employment.

Medical education has had fifteen more years of experience with competency-based education from which legal educators can learn. This article has focused on medical education’s “lessons learned” applicable to legal education regarding effective assessment of professional-identity learning outcomes.

Legal education has many other disciplines, including medicine, to look to for examples of implementing outcome-based assessment.  Professor Hamilton’s article nicely draws upon lessons learned by medical schools in assessing professional formation, an outcome that some law schools have decided to implement.

In looking at professional identity formation, in particular, progression is important. The curriculum and assessments must build on each other in order to see whether students are improving in this area. The hidden curriculum is a valuable area to teach and assess a competency like professional identity formation. But this requires coordination among various silos:

Law schools historically have been structured in silos with strongly guarded turf in and around each silo. Each of the major silos (including doctrinal classroom faculty, clinical faculty, lawyering skills faculty, externship directors, career services and professional development staff, and counseling staff) wants control over and autonomy regarding its turf. Coordination among these silos is going to take time and effort and involve some loss of autonomy but in return a substantial increase in student development and employment outcomes. For staff in particular, there should be much greater recognition that they are co-educators along with faculty to help students achieve the learning outcomes.

Full-time faculty members were not trained in a competency-based education model, and many have limited experience with some of the competencies, for example teamwork, that many law schools are including in their learning outcomes. In my experience, many full-time faculty members also have enormous investments in doctrinal knowledge and legal and policy analysis concerning their doctrinal field. They believe that the student’s law school years are about learning doctrinal knowledge, strong legal and policy analysis, and research and writing skills. These faculty members emphasize that they have to stay focused on “coverage” with the limited time in their courses even though this model of coverage of doctrinal knowledge and the above skills overemphasizes these competencies in comparison with the full range of competencies that legal employers and clients indicate they want.

In my view, this is the greatest  challenge with implementing a competency-based model of education in law schools. (Prof. Hamilton’s article has a nice summary of time-based versus competency-based education models.) Most law school curricula are silo-based. At most schools, a required first-year curriculum is followed by a largely unconnected series of electives in the second and third years. There are few opportunities for longitudinal study of outcomes in such an environment. In medical schools, however, there are clear milestones at which to assess knowledge, skills, and values for progression and growth.